Nobody's indispensable?

Boss telling woman that 'babies need their mamas' is not discrimination, jury says

Perfect example why employers pay men more and prefer them in employment and promotion.

Too, when single men get married or become parents they get more committed to their jobs.

When single women get married they quit, or they get pregnant and quit, or they get pregnant and take maternity leave without quitting and then, when it's time to come back, they quit or come back only briefly before going home to be with their babies.

Single women who become moms are pretty iffy, too.

These are pretty much the norm, not the exception.

Men as a group are better, more reliable, and more committed employees.

But, increasingly, women want the same pay and the same advancement opportunities as men, despite all that.

The employers' viewpoint is easily understood; theirs is the "market solution" beloved of conservatives fiscal and social, as well as libertarians.

The women's viewpoint is easily understood; radical feminism notwithstanding, the roles of moms and dads in reproduction and child care continue generally to be quite different, and women do not want to lose out at work because of what everyone knows they need and may want to do as parents.

In our society in which women want and need to work, the market solution penalizes families and is powerfully anti-natalist in a way that chiefly affects people likely to do a good job of parenting.

And it hurts them all the more the further they are down the social pecking order, in view of the fact that employers commonly regard employees of these classes as easily replaceable semi-moronic chimps, though it costs them much year after year that they never realize they are losing by such contempt.

Conservatives are the inevitable allies of employers in all this, both the sociocons/Christian Right and the fiscal conservatives/libertarians; Main Street and Wall Street, hand in hand.

Progressives, of course, not being all that wedded to the market, social conservatism, or legal enactment of God's will as revealed in the Bible (or anywhere at all) in any case, are the natural potential sponsors of so much of the feminist agenda as strengthens rather than attacks the family.

Bearing in mind all the while that progressives do not consider changes making participation in marriage, parenthood, and parenting less compulsory and more a matter of free choice as attacks on the family, though such changes are counted as exactly that by sociocons and the Christian Right, and have had a notably depressing effect on fertility throughout the Occident.